Robert James Taylor

DPhil Student

New College

Research Topic

A Trip to India: Cultural Indophilia, British Hippiedom, and Post-Imperial Memory

Supervisor: Yasmin Khan

My research considers the influence of an imagined 'India' on the British cultural output of the mid-late sixties, connecting the burgeoning historiographical fields of interdisciplinary cultural history and post-imperial memory. It seeks to investigate British hippies and their romanticised fascination with a reified idea of India, expressed through artistic means, in order to analyse post-1945 British society's mutable understandings of its recent imperial past.

I received a Double First Class degree in History after studying as an undergraduate at New College, Oxford, and completed my MPhil in American History at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Before returning to Oxford, I worked in London for various educational and Social Impact-focused organisations, as well as performing music professionally.

Awards and Recognition

New College Senior Scholarship (2024-)
Winner of the H. W. C. Davis Prize for the highest overall mark in the Preliminary Examinations in History at Oxford, placing 1st in my cohort of more than 250 historians.
New College Academic Scholarship (2017-19) and New College Collection Prizes
Awarded historical funding from the Reynolds Bequest to visit the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, Virginia.
Achieved a First Class degree in the Oxford History Final Honour School, placing in the top 5% of History students overall.

Publications

Previous Research

Undergraduate dissertation - "a Catholicke in his profession, no man more: a reporter of things he saw or knew, no man truer": Robert Dallington's Aphorismes and the English Reception of Guicciardini
MPhil dissertation - Hemispheric Indigenous History in the Early American Republic, 1783-1808
Familial research featured in Chowkidar: The Journal of the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia 17/1 (2024), pp. 3-4, 12.